A new paper by Harvard Forest Postdoc Sydne Record describes plant species associated with a regionally rare hemiparasitic plant, Swamp Lousewort (Pedicularis lanceolata), across its geographic range. Sydne performed this research as part of her dissertation work with Harvard Forest Senior Research Ecologist Aaron Ellison. See the full article published in Rhodora.

Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison and collaborators from the University of Vermont, University of Tennessee, and North Carolina State University have received a large grant from the National Science Foundation to study the adaptability of forest ants to climate change. Ants process forest soil, cycle nutrients, disperse seeds of many understory plants, and respond rapidly to changes in air temperature. In addition to conducting laboratory experiments, the research group will collect samples of ants from forests throughout the eastern U.S.

Unlike bedbugs and ticks whose nourishment comes from mammals, parasitic plants acquire mineral nutrients, sugar, and water by using cup-shaped root structures called haustoria to suck on the roots or stems of other plants.

Another article in a series of papers describing findings from the Harvard Forest long term Hemlock Removal Experiment has been published in Ecosphere. In this paper, a group of researchers including Harvard Forest Senior Researcher Aaron Ellison, and post-docs Sydne Record and Ben Baiser, look at the effects of the hemlock woolly adelgid and pre-emptive salvage logging on communities of ants, beetles, and spiders in hemlock dominated stands. Relative to intact hemlock stands, in situ death of hemlock and logging/removal of hemlock altered composition and diversity of beetles and spiders.

Forest ecologist Dave Orwig, along with collaborators Evan Preisser (Principal Investigator-University of Rhode Island), Tom Holmes (USDA Forest Service), and Joe Elkinton (Umass Amherst) have received a $422,000 grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) - Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI). The grant focuses on the two invasive insects that threaten our native hemlock forest ecosystems: the hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) and the elongate hemlock scale (EHS). Their research addresses several questions of pressing ecological significance.

Data on insect population sizes collected at the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) LTER were used in a new paper by a group including HF senior ecologist Aaron Ellison focused on new methods to detect changes in species assemblages through time. The methods, including hierarchical models and bootstrapping, provide ways to detect temporal trends in the relatively short time-series of data that are characteristic of many LTER datasets.

We are very pleased to announce that Elizabeth Crone, Associate Professor of Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana, will assume the new position of Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest this fall.

Israel Del Toro received two grants in June - $5000 from the National Geographic Society and $3500 from the Lewis and Clark Fund of the American Philosophical Society. Both awards will help Del Toro, along with REU student Adam Clark (Harvard '11) sample ants throughout northeastern North America this summer. Del Toro is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, where he is studying the impacts of climate change on distribution and range expansion of ants. His Ph.D. advisor is Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison.

After being extirpated from southern New England during the colonial period, moose have recently returned, establishing an important new disturbance to the region's temperate forests. In the first publication of moose foraging ecology in southern New England, Harvard Forest researchers Ed Faison, David Foster, and Glenn Motzkin along with US Fish and Wildlife biologist, John McDonald quantify moose foraging selectivity and intensity on tree species in relation to habitat features in Central Massachusetts.